


Milk and Sugar

by lwise2019



Category: Stand Still Stay Silent
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-03-04
Updated: 2021-03-04
Packaged: 2021-03-17 22:15:31
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,292
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29848296
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lwise2019/pseuds/lwise2019
Comments: 8
Kudos: 9





	Milk and Sugar

“Eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow we die.”

“That isn’t funny, Väinö. This is the end of the world. It really _is.”_

“I know. I do know.” Väinö Lehtinen looked across the counter at his wife, Pihla. At only twenty-six to his thirty-three, she was too young to die. But then, so was he. “The Rash is everywhere and everyone’s exposed and everyone’s going to die. But there’s nothing we can _do._ Why not get what pleasure we can until the end? And what gives me pleasure is seeing people drink my coffee. So the coffee shop is open, and I’m going to keep serving until I drop.”

He gestured at their small, cozy shop with the four round wooden tables and a dozen straight wooden chairs, the framed photographs of Finnish landscapes on the walls, and the new gas stove, his pride and joy. They had poured their hearts and souls into it for the past four years, and he willed Pihla to see it now as a little oasis of beauty and peace amid horror. After a moment, she threw her hands up in resignation. “All right. I’ll change the sign.”

With the “Open” sign hanging in the window, the first customer, Leevi, ventured in. They thought of him as “A bit of milk”, for such had been his order every morning ever since they’d opened the shop. Once he took his seat in a wooden chair beside a well-scrubbed round table, other customers followed: Aada (“Milk and sugar”), several who ordered “just plain”, and others. They, too, seemed to have accepted the inevitable. When Aada scratched her shoulder, dislodging the patterned silk scarf she always wore and revealing the rash beneath, a tremor ran through the crowd and conversation stopped for a moment before picking up again. But no one fled; Väinö continued to prepare coffee at his long stove behind the counter, and Pihla continued to carry mugs to customers.

The evening was well advanced when the last customers left, thanking Väinö and Pihla as they departed. Pihla flipped the sign to the “Closed” side and looked at her husband as she leaned against the window. “You’re right, dear. It’s much better to serve our people than to just curl up and wait for death.”

They smiled sadly into each other’s eyes, still deeply in love after five years of marriage and despite the death all around them, and left the shop together for the night.

* * *

Three weeks later, Väinö and Pihla sat side by side, gazing out at the town, empty and quiet in the cold winter sunlight. With each breath, they inhaled the warm scent of coffee beans. A week before, the shop had received the last shipment of coffee in Finland. The truck driver who brought it had, like the Lehtinens, chosen to do what he could to make life better before the end, but the shops where he had meant to deliver coffee were all closed except this one.

“Here, take it all,” he told them, and they did, stacking boxes upon boxes in their small storeroom and more boxes in the shop itself. Before the Rash, this would have been six months’ supply. And now? They expected the beans to outlast them.

“I don’t think anyone’s coming,” Väinö said after a while.

“They must be all dead by now.”

“Or worse.” They both shuddered, remembering the Internet rumors and the few videos that hadn’t been removed quite quickly enough. The Rash didn’t always kill. Sometimes it transformed the victim into something … monstrous.

“Have you felt any itching?” Pihla asked, her gaze turned somewhere outside.

“Just psychosomatic itches. I keep checking but, so far, nothing. You?”

“No, not me either. We must have been exposed, though. There’s no way we could have avoided it.”

“They say the incubation is less than two weeks,” Väinö pointed out. “We should have some sign of it by now, if we’re going to catch it.”

“But if we don’t have any sign of it, that has to mean we’re immune. That we’re _both_ immune.”

“What’s the odds of _that?”_

Pihla had kept the books for the shop because she had a better head for math than her husband. “Well, they do say the probability of immunity is about one percent. One per hundred. So for two unrelated people to be —”

“We’re not unrelated.”

“For two people unrelated _by blood_ both to be immune, that’s one in a hundred times a hundred. One in ten thousand. Really unlikely, but possible. So I guess it’s happened to us.”

“Lucky us.” He looked around their little shop with their living quarters upstairs. “How can we survive all alone? Especially if there really are, um, monsters out there.”

“We’re going to need light. Candles, maybe.” The power had gone out early that day, long before the winter sunrise. “And some way to heat this place.” The gas was still on, but for how long?

Her husband frowned, thinking. “When we were at your father’s house, he and I went out to the shed for some reason. I don’t remember why; I think he was —” He caught himself. Pihla had turned her face away, was studying a photograph of Koli’s amazing landscape. Her mother had passed away from cancer just a few months after their marriage, and her father had succumbed to the Rash very early in the epidemic. “Uh, yes. There’s an old pot-bellied stove out there. We could bring that back here, and whatever firewood is still there, and keep the place warm that way.”

Pihla nodded without looking at him. “We’ll need food too.” They wouldn’t need water since they had a well, hand-pumped now with the power lost.

“Yeah, we won’t get far eating coffee beans. I guess all the shops were bought out, but there might be something that didn’t make it onto the shelves.” He looked out again at the wintry day. “Supposedly the monsters don’t like sunlight or cold, so this is probably our best time to go scavenging.” He put a loving arm around his wife. “Can you do this? I shouldn’t leave you alone.”

“I can do it.” They stood together, and Pihla remembered to turn their sign to “Closed” before they left.

* * *

Driving to Pihla’s father’s home, just a kilometer away, they found it undisturbed since his death. A surprising quantity of non-perishable food remained in the cabinets. As he had died early in the epidemic, he had been buried in a private grave, to the great relief of both Lehtinens, who could not have endured the sight of his decaying corpse in the house.

In his shed, besides the pot-bellied stove and firewood, they found a stack of plastic sheets and construction lumber. “Oh, yeah, that,” Pihla said. “He was going to build a greenhouse. He had all the materials, but then Mom got sick and then she died …” Her voice trailed off. “But, yeah, but _we_ could build a greenhouse. I’ll bet the garden shops weren’t cleaned out, so we can get seeds. We can grow our own food!”

Most of the short winter day had passed, and the two were hot and sweaty despite the chilly air by the time they had hauled the stove, the firewood, and the makings of the greenhouse back to their home. An axe had also turned up in the shed, giving them a better weapon than the heavy stick which Väinö had been carrying around, just in case. Taking a last look around the shed for anything they’d missed, Väinö paused, frowning. “What’s that over there?”

“That” was a cylindrical object wrapped in white plastic, well over a meter tall, and leaning in a corner, and Pihla had no idea what it might be. Curious, Väinö picked it up, sliced the plastic with his pocketknife, and pulled it away.

“A shotgun! Dad never told me he had a shotgun.”

“This is better even than the axe!” Four boxes of twenty-five shotgun shells each gave them some ammunition to go with the firearm, and they took their prizes home. After a candlelit and coffee-scented evening beside the new stove, they passed a quiet night.

The following day dawned cold and clear again. They finished cleaning out Pihla’s father’s shed and searched shops near their own. Always Väinö went in first with the loaded shotgun, but they found no lurking monsters. As the short day ended, they had several months’ supply of food and candles, and a collection of seeds for a garden or the greenhouse. To their surprise, they found a box of coffee seeds and they brought that along too. A hardware store provided a couple of wind-up flashlights, plywood to board up their windows, and a solid wooden door to replace their inviting glass door.

With the ground floor secured, with food, water, a couple of weapons, and a plan for Spring, they settled down to wait for the authorities to straighten things out.

* * *

Two days later, in the moonlit pre-dawn hours of winter, Väinö and Pihla sat by the window in their bedroom. The pot-bellied stove in the room below warmed the room, and they sipped coffee in companionable silence.

Scratch. Scratch.

With a fearful glance at each other, they set down their mugs and leaned to peer out the window at the sidewalk before the shop’s door.

Below their window was a … thing. Its dark green body was roughly round, a meter across, two mismatched legs on one side and three on the other, a stubby tail, and a narrow neck about half a meter long ending in a bald, elongated head. One leg scratched at the heavy wooden door. To the horror of the two above, the monster wore a patterned silk scarf around its neck.

“Do you think it’s —?” Pihla couldn’t finish the question.

“How else would it get that scarf?” Väinö swallowed. “That’s, that has to be … Aada.”

“Do you think, do you think it’s possible, that she wants her morning coffee?”

Her husband stared down at the monstrosity below. “There’s no milk.”

“We picked up that horrible dry milk. Maybe that’s good enough. Maybe she’ll take that and go away.”

“I can make a mug for her, but I don’t dare open that door. She might —”

“Could you carry it around from the back? Just set it down and run?”

Väinö considered. “Its — her — legs don’t look very usable. I guess I could outrun her. If there aren’t any others.”

They looked up and down the deserted street in the moonlight.

“All right.” He swallowed. “I’ll do it before she breaks down the door or something.”

Armed with the shotgun, a wind-up flashlight, and a mug of coffee with sugar and reconstituted dried milk, Väinö slipped out the back door. After a cautious look around for lurking threats, he crept around the side of the building.

The monster was still scratching at the door. He could smell it even before he turned the corner to the front, a nauseating stench of decay. Before his nerve could fail, he darted out, set down the mug, fled to the back door, and dodged inside. Pihla closed and locked the door behind him. Secure once more, they clutched each other, shaking.

After a few moments, they returned to the bedroom window and peered out at the monster. It was squatting before their door, one awkward limb fumbling at the mug before lifting it to the muzzle-like mouth. Scarcely breathing, they watched it drain the mug, set it down unbroken, and lurch away.

When the sun was well up, Väinö opened the heavy wooden front door and retrieved the mug. “I don’t think I ever want to drink from this again,” he said, looking at it with distaste. “Or to let anyone else drink from it. Maybe we should break it.”

“I think she’ll be back,” Pihla said. She took it from him, scrubbed it several times, and labelled it with Aada’s name before putting it on a shelf by itself.

The next day, Väinö took Aada her coffee in her own mug.

* * *

“I can't go out there,” Väinö whispered. “There's something moving.”

Pihla took his place at the peephole. “It's pretty small.”

“What we can _see_ is small. There might be only part of it, or there might be more. And even if it's small, I don't want to waste a shot and maybe stir up other things.”

Pihla gave an uneasy glance over her shoulder toward the front door. “If she doesn't get her coffee …”

Her husband looked that way too. “Wait, she's stopped scratching.” He bit his lip, looked again at the back door, went back through the shop to peer through the other peephole.

“She's gone over there.” He gestured to the right with the mug in his hand. “I think she's, she's _looking_ for me.” With no words exchanged, they knew what to do. Pihla unlocked and opened the door, Väinö thrust the mug outside, and she closed and locked the door again, just missing his retreating fingers. She peeked through the peephole.

“She's — Väinö, she's _fighting_ a little monster over there. I can't see — It looks dead. Smashed. Now she's coming back. She's taking it. She's drinking it.” They gave each other a high-five before returning to their bedroom.

* * *

As Winter gave way to Spring, the Lehtinens constructed a greenhouse and filled it with coffee plants. That which had been Aada patrolled her coffee source by night, killing anything that came near. By day, the humans tended their garden and their greenhouse, and before dawn every day, they put out a mug of coffee for Aada. They continued to wait for the authorities to straighten things out.

And the authorities did not come.

Ever.


End file.
